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First Frame latency Benchmarks for NAG Online

So I've been figuring this out for half the day while working on another review and I think I've gotten it down. I'm testing out the Catalyst 13-04 drivers against the ones that were least released for the HD6000 generation - 12-10. I've never had reason to install the new ones since most of the time things went swimmingly.

However, sometimes drivers do make things better and I'll put up my results so far. This is just the result of a day's testing and it's nothing extensive. I did find one interesting benefit from the drivers, though. I won't post up FPS averages for now, just the latency graphs. I'm still working out how to show things like the 99th percentile and **** like that, so this is a work in progress. I can sort of do scatter graphs as well, but I'm terrible at it.

Component:

Model:

Speed:

Processor

AMD Athlon II X3 445

3.1GHz

RAM

4GB Hynix and Kingston

DDR3-1333

Motherboard

ECS A785GM-AD3

HT2000

Graphics card

AMD Radeon HD6870 1GB

900MHz core, 1050MHz VRAM

Operating System

Windows 8 Professional 64-bit

GAME SETTINGS:

Borderlands 2:

Settings:

Framerate

Unlimited

Resolution

1920 x 1080

Ambient Occlusion

On

Depth of Field

On

Anisotropic Filtering

4x

Bullet Decals

High

Foliage Distance

Far

Texture Quality

High

Game Detail

High

View Distance

High

Physc

Low

FXAA

Off

DiRT 3:

Settings:

Resolution

1920 x 1080

Refresh rate

74Hz

VSync

Off

Night Lighting

High

Shadows

High

Particles

High

Mirrors

High

Characters

High

Ground Cover

High

Distant Vehicles

High

Objects

High

Trees

High

Vehicle Reflections

High

Water

High

Post Process

High

Skidmarks

On

Ambient Occlusion

High

Cloth

High

Crysis 3:

Settings:

Resolution

1920 x 1080

Anti-Aliasing

SMAA Low

Texture Resolution

Low

VSync

Off

Game Effects

Medium

Objects

Low

Particles

Low

Shading

Medium

Shadows

Low

Water

Low

Anisotropic Filtering

1x

Motion Blur

Low

Lens Flare

Yes

I did the uninstall thing and it went fine. There's nothing particularly interesting about the new drivers from a functionality standpoint, but the Gaming section in CCC gets some changes. There's now an option for frame rate control, which is essentially VSync. You can now force Triple buffering globally for OpenGL titles. Not much else besides that the the usual other features.

For Reference:

Frame Time (ms)

FPS Rate

8.3

120

16.7

60

20

50

25

40

30

50

20

BORDERLANDS 2:

I picked Sawtooth Cauldron for the test. From the beginning I run to the right and jump down the cliff into the landing of a double-story building. I kill one enemy coming out of the garage, hit the gas tank in front of me, turn around and kill two more, run over the guardrails and jump to the ground and make my way to the slope that finally takes me back to the entrance. During all this time there's lots of light rays, some lens flare, smoke and fire along with grenade effects, elemental effects from my weapons, a pretty large and detailed area as well as ****loads of enemies. I think it's pretty good.

The results are actually pretty similar, so there's no performance increase from the drivers here. The longer frame times are when I got blocked in by enemies or I went into "Fight or Die" mode and I was being swarmed. They are long hiccups but I'm sure it's minor. I ran the test again to be sure and it wasn't as bad. There's perhaps a 2-3% increase here.

DiRT 3:

I wish I had Showdown right now, but this will have to do. I pretty much dialed in the settings, saved them and then ran the benchmark that's found in the graphics settings all the way at the bottom.

Gameplay on both the 12-10 and 13-4 drivers was pretty good, although the high settings do seem to swamp my card a bit. I was averaging 50fps there, which is pretty good. Moving to 13-4 the variance became a little more pronounced on the graph but I didn't really notice it in the game. Considering that both DiRT 3 and my Radeon HD6870 came out over two years ago, this isn't really a surprise. I did, however, notice something when fiddling with things and turning the graphics details to Ultra where possible.

Excuse the same colours, for now I just wanted to get this process finished so I can tweak it later. As you can see, enabling Ultra details doesn't seem to have impacted performance - in fact, most of the time it's actually running better than the High detail settings. I didn't make a third graph comparing 12-10 High to 13-4 Ultra, but you can see for yourself that it's a lot better and more stable. That's one win for the drivers there.

Crysis 3:

In some sections, my play-through of Crysis with 13-4 is better than 12-10. It pushes out a slightly higher amount of frames in the 60-second benchmark. Those two long ones stretching to 140ms actually measure 1800ms in length. This is similar behaviour to Crysis 2 and it's related to the game engine. Mind you, I'm also playing on low settings. Crysis 3 is really heavy on my triple-core processor and my 1GB of VRAM suffers wheny ou turn the details up to Medium.

Just high frame times and stuttering everywhere. I'd hate to see numbers from Far Cry 3, I'm sure that's equally devastating. I'd probably benefit more from a new GPU than a processor upgrade at this point.

So 13-4 is only a tiny amount better for HD6000 owners and AMD isn't fixing any latency numbers for the older GPU family with this driver set (if anything, latency for my games actually was a little worse). I have heard about the 13-5 Beta 2 drivers that are out and I will have a test soon, but I've got a feeling it'll only be the same, possibly worse. AMD's putting all their best into GCN optimisation and for those of you still on cards like mine, Catalyst 12-10 will be good enough. There might be bug fixes and the like for 13-4, though, so you might as well get it because sometimes AMD fixes things for one game that also fix issues for other titles at the same time.